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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Leverage previous company experience:
Zhang and her co-founder's insights from their time at Stilt gave them unique competitive advantages in understanding customer pain points. Sometimes the best startup ideas come from seeing unfinished business or unsolved problems at previous companies rather than a single "aha" moment.
Focus on high-quality early customers:
Pier specifically targets customers who are leaders in their respective categories, focusing on companies with 4.5+ star ratings and strong growth trajectories. This creates a "golden standard" playbook that can be replicated across similar verticals, making future sales much easier.
Embrace organic growth channels:
Despite having no dedicated sales or marketing team, Pier achieved significant growth through word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied customers and investors. They prioritized genuine in-person conversations at industry conferences over cold outreach.
Move fast despite obstacles:
The founders didn't let perfect timing dictate their launch. Despite missing YC batch deadlines and personal commitments, they moved forward because they had validated customer demand. Their ability to secure their first customer within four weeks validated this approach.
Build for specific pain points:
Instead of creating a general solution, Pier focused heavily on the compliance aspect of lending infrastructure after identifying it as the most painful and challenging part for potential customers through extensive market research and conversations.
Conversation
Highlights
From Hospital Calls to Enterprise Sales: How Pier is Redefining Credit Infrastructure
In January 2023, Jessica Zhang was taking founder calls from outside a hospital operating room while her co-founder was on his honeymoon in Italy. Despite missing Y Combinator’s batch deadline and facing personal challenges, they couldn’t wait to launch Pier. Their customers were already asking for the product.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jessica Zhang, CEO and Co-founder of Pier, shared how they’re building a credit compliance platform that’s raised $2.5M from notable investors including Y Combinator, OpenAI, and Morgan Stanley.
The Genesis of an Infrastructure Play
The idea for Pier emerged from a painful reality Jessica and her co-founder Alex witnessed at their previous company, Stilt. “We saw firsthand how expensive and time consuming it was for credit industry to outfit their existing tech stack to offer innovative credit products,” Jessica explains. Companies were spending millions of dollars and 6-9 months just to launch basic credit offerings.
But rather than building another point solution in an already fragmented market, they took a different approach. “We kind of went back to the drawing board with a very heavy first principles approach,” Jessica shares. “We looked at everything we knew, everything we didn’t know, every single part of the lending stack.”
After hundreds of conversations with industry players, one theme emerged consistently: compliance was the biggest pain point. This insight became their wedge into the market.
Redefining Enterprise Sales Cycles
The conventional wisdom in B2B software says enterprise deals take time. The industry benchmark for contracts over $80k ARR is 83 days. Pier closed their first deal in just four weeks.
“We kind of really knew we were onto something because we landed our first customer less than four weeks after launch,” Jessica notes. “Our customers were telling us that we’re addressing a sharp, urgent pain they had in the sector and that they were willing to pay us quite a bit of money to solve for that.”
The Golden Standard Playbook
Instead of casting a wide net, Pier developed what Jessica calls their “golden standard” approach to growth. “We really focus on customers who are the best or top of each of their respective categories,” she explains. Their consumer app customers, for instance, must have at least a 4.5-star rating on the App Store.
This selective approach creates a powerful ripple effect. As Jessica describes, “When you work with the top company of each category or vertical… once this golden standard is established, selling to other companies in similar space becomes so much easier because you essentially have a playbook that you can repeat and reuse.”
Building Without Traditional GTM
Perhaps most surprisingly, Pier has achieved this growth without a traditional go-to-market team. “We currently don’t have like a sales or marketing team so it’s been all founder led,” Jessica reveals. Instead of cold outreach, they’ve focused on authentic connections through industry events and word-of-mouth referrals.
The Future of Credit Access
Jessica envisions a future where consumers no longer rely on traditional financial institutions for credit. “We see a future where consumers and businesses no longer go to banks or credit unions for their financial access or credit needs, but instead their favorite brands,” she explains.
This vision has attracted backing from a diverse group of investors including Y Combinator, Airbnb, OpenAI, Experian, and Morgan Stanley. Jessica attributes this support to multiple factors: “We had really strong customer love, we had high contract sizes, we had a very large tam, even just in the US unsecured lending market alone.”
The Pier story demonstrates how deep market understanding and strategic customer selection can accelerate enterprise sales cycles, even in highly regulated markets. By focusing on solving sharp pain points and establishing category standards through market leaders, they’ve created a repeatable playbook for scaling credit infrastructure.
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